


Wolf Run

by Sholio



Series: Werewolf Peter [3]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-25
Updated: 2014-10-25
Packaged: 2018-02-22 13:52:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2510099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another installment in my werewolf!AU. Diana struggles with her werewolf side. Peter tries to help. (Also for my h/c bingo square "cursed".)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wolf Run

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magistrate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magistrate/gifts).



> I offered Halloween ficlets at my [DW](http://sholio.dreamwidth.org) and Magi wanted werewolf!Peter and werewolf!Diana.
> 
> This is chronologically set earlier than the Neal stories.

Diana wakes at a gas station, her head resting against the rain-streaked window of Peter's car. She's not sure where they are. The station is a new Shell plaza, but the highway is two-lane, so they're off the interstate now.

She's a little surprised she was able to sleep. She always feels wrong before her change, a creeping wrongness that comes up in her slowly over a matter of days. Her skin is too small and tight. She tires easily but stays up until three or four in the morning, too jittery to sleep. She gets anxious in crowds and doesn't like turning her back on people.

Yet she'd been able to fall asleep in Peter's car, watching Peter's sure hands on the steering wheel beneath half-closed lids. It was not a comforting sleep. She does not remember her dreams, but is left with a muzzy unsettled feeling, with flashes of forest paths under her paws and the wet crunch of jaws sinking into flesh and bone ...

"Sorry," Peter says as he gets back into the car with a cup of coffee. "Didn't mean to wake you up."

"That's all right." She tries to drag her bleary brain back to the real world, pushing away the dreams. It's more than usual nap fuzziness and she knows it. Of all the things she hates about the change, perhaps that's what she hates most -- or second-most, anyway, next to the appalling loss of control over her own body. She can't _think_ properly. And it's going to get worse and worse, she knows, until she can't think at all --

"You want coffee? I can go back and get something if you're hungry."

"No," she says. The smell of his coffee turns her stomach, or maybe it's something else in the car making her feel that way. Peter's car is conspicuously devoid of the heavy smells some people's cars have -- no air fresheners, no gum or candy wrappers. He doesn't wear cologne and she can tell from here that his laundry detergent is unscented; even though the werewolf sense of smell is human-normal most of the month, she's yet to meet one who enjoys the smell of artificial perfumes. Still, her body reacts unpredictably to everything during the change.

And Peter doesn't ask questions, because he knows how it is. She can sense the restlessness in him, too. His smell is sharp, musky. Not quite human.

"How much farther?" she asks, rubbing her eyes and pushing herself upright in her seat.

"It's about another hour." He signals a turn onto the rain-wet highway. "You could sleep a bit more."

"No," she says, and doesn't explain.

It's wild country this far north of the city. She's never been up here. They're probably in the Adirondacks, or maybe those are farther north? Peter showed her on a map where they were going, traced their route while talking all the while about the old family farm and what it was like to grow up there. She doesn't remember any of the details now; they've slipped out of her hazy brain, crowded out by predatory hyper-arousal. The passing cars are too fast and make her want to -- to run, after them or away from them, she doesn't even know. Once she glimpses a deer in the mist-draped trees at the side of the road, and her head snaps around as if drawn by a cord connecting her to the animal. Her pulse leaps in her throat, and sudden panic grips her in its icy claws. She's fumbling for the door handle before she realizes what she's doing, before her human brain can catch up and remind her that she's in a car traveling at 55 mph and they're driving north and she has to stay with Peter because if she doesn't --

"This is a mistake," she says. "I'm sorry, Peter, I don't think I can do this."

"You can. It'll be all right. You'll see."

"Take me back," she says, but even as the words come out, she's looking at the dashboard clock and it's after 3 p.m. and there's no _time,_ no time to drive back to the city and her saferoom before the early autumn darkness. "Peter, I can't -- there are chains in the trunk, I know you have them, maybe you can put them on me --"

"You won't need them." His voice is calm, and she doesn't understand how he can be so placid when she's one step away from a panic attack and she can smell the same restlessness, the same bloodthirst in him that she's feeling. "You know you can keep your head through the change. You've been doing it for months now with your Internet friends."

"Yes, but that's --" _Different,_ she wants to say. They're all like her, young urban werewolves without family nearby, as conscious as Diana of the hot human presence in the city around them. They all lock themselves up. It's how the change is done. She's heard rumors of urban packs that run wild in the city's abandoned places, through old junkyards and rotting docks and the bands of woods that still exist even in Brooklyn, but that sort of person is viewed with suspicion and distrust by her new friends. It's like having unprotected sex with an STD. Responsible people don't do that sort of thing.

She loses a little time, comes back to herself when Peter slows for a small town with a bland, blighted downtown maybe two blocks long. Peeling paint, boarded-up businesses. There's a hardware store and a place selling ice cream. He turns onto a small side road and then a dirt road with no sign, just a bank of a dozen or so mailboxes.

The area was rural enough already, but this is banjo country. The road twists up hills and around blind corners. It's only wide enough for one car, and she wonders what would happen if they met another. But they don't. Driveways turn off here and there, some of them no more than two rutted tire tracks with weeds growing between them. Peter slows to crawl through mud holes, and, with small sharp jolts of panic, she keeps expecting them to get stuck. Peter eases them through with expert precision.

And then they're turning down one of those rutted driveways themselves. Like the road, the driveway seems to go on forever. They cross a bridge made of railroad ties that hardly looks wide enough for the car.

When Peter said he grew up on a farm, Diana had pictured something from one of those insipid nature calendars, a red barn and sweeping hills covered with fall-tinted maples, maybe a few spotted cows doing whatever cows do in pastures. Not ... this.

"Where on Earth did you go to school?" she asks, peering down at the rain-swollen creek below the bridge. "Or did you?"

"Oh, we did. Mom or Uncle Stewart would drive us down to the main road, where the bus picked us up." Peter pauses for a moment as he navigates a particularly tricky blind curve, then adds, "It was a pretty normal childhood, all things considered."

"Are all of you werewolves?" It's still hard for her to say the word. There should be some other word for what she is, something that hasn't been overused, _misused_ , in horror movies and paranormal romance novels. "At the farm, I mean."

"Everyone but Uncle Stewart. Married into the family."

"Okay, so ..." She began to tick off on her fingers. "The people I'm going to meet -- there are your parents, of course, and your sister --"

Peter shook his head. "Susan lives over near Utica. She married into another werewolf pack there. She and Bill come over quite a bit, but they're pretty busy with the new business and their kids. No, it's just Mom and Dad, and Grandma, and Uncle Stewart and Aunt Martha -- that's Mom's sister. That's it, unless anyone from Dad's family is up this month. That pack is out in Wyoming, mostly."

That's a lot more than Peter's ever talked about his family. Werewolves, Diana thinks; a whole network of werewolves, marrying into each other's families and hunting together and maintaining their own sense of community. It draws her and it repels her, offering a sweetly seductive promise she can't quite trust.

Before she can decide what else she wants to ask him, what answers she most needs, the road levels off and they break out of the trees. 

Here Diana finds something more like the farm she'd been expecting (and less like the rural squalor she was afraid of). There's no red barn -- all the outbuildings are the gray-brown of weathered wood -- but the farm is well kept ... and extensive, with fields and pastures rambling up and down rolling hills. There are cows doing cow things, and sheep doing sheep things, and a whole lot of different-colored chickens in a series of long wire runs.

Peter parks beside a pair of mud-caked trucks and a backhoe. Diana looks at the backhoe curiously as she gets out of the car. She's not used to being around people who own their own earth-moving equipment.

It's astonishingly quiet here, perhaps the quietest place she's ever been. The only human sound is the drone of some kind of engine behind one of the outbuildings. The cows low softly and the chickens make chicken noises. The rain has stopped falling, but the ground is muddy and mist lies across the hills.

And the smells ... the smells strike deep into her hindbrain. Mud and trees and rain and people and _animals_ , so many animals -- she's drawing back with a whimper before she can stop herself, reaching for the door of the car. Her mouth waters and she's not sure if it means she's hungry or needs to throw up.

"Hey." Peter reaches for her, and she bristles instinctively at his touch, baring teeth as a growl bubbles to the surface. He forces the contact anyway, human teeth showing behind half-parted lips, not a conscious decision on his part any more than she means to growl at him. Peter pushes her back against the car and the fight drains out of her, and what floods in to replace it is a kind of relaxed relief. Peter's taking charge so she doesn't have to, and he's her boss, and she can stop fighting because he said it's okay so it's okay.

Which probably means she's a lot closer to the change than she wants to be, but it's the first time all day that she's felt even halfway good, and she's got enough common sense left in her conflicted mess of a brain not to overthink it until she argues herself back into a bad headspace.

Peter lets her go with an awkward pat on the shoulder that's somehow very _him._ Diana, loose-kneed, stays propped against the side of the car, and Peter looks worried but gets distracted by a pair of muddy mongrel dogs trotting down from the main house. They avoid Diana and greet Peter cautiously. Diana watches in fascination as Peter -- by instinct, she's pretty sure -- doesn't pet them like a human would, but goes down on his knees in the mud, touches faces and lets them fawn on him.

He gets up, brushing off his knees, and Diana is less wobbly by then, so she walks with him toward the main house. "Don't the animals have trouble with the -- you know? Dogs and cats have never really liked me."

"They're used to it, I guess," Peter says. "They know we won't hurt them." He drops a hand to one of the dogs and this time, after a cautious sniff, it lets him pet it.

It's hours yet 'til moonrise, and the moon is hidden behind heavy clouds in any case, but Diana still feels it tug at her blood. The farther she gets from the car, the more she finds herself sinking into the farm and forest smells, as the wolf begins to overwrite the human part of her brain. It's harder to hold onto her humanity out here. Some part of her knew all along that it would be.

But Peter said it would be all right. Peter told her there are acres and acres of wild land on his family's farm to run in. She doesn't have to spend the change cooped up between four narrow walls, frustrated and miserable and confused because her wolf-brain doesn't understand the necessity of confinement the way her human brain does. She can find out what it's like to read the smells on the night wind, to stretch out her long gray-furred legs and run and run and _run_ ...

She doesn't notice she's fallen behind until Peter stops and looks back. He smiles and waits for her. Behind him, there's a lamp in the window of the farmhouse. She has to fight the urge to hug her arms around her body like a child.

"Come on," Peter says, and smiles crookedly. "It's all right. They expect you. They're looking forward to meeting you."

She takes a deep breath and goes to join him.


End file.
